3.3 – Appropriation

In the wake of civil war, Gallifrey stands defenceless and vulnerable. The other temporal powers are ready to seize power.

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Styre
on May 9, 2016 at 1:25 AM

GALLIFREY: APPROPRIATION

There are very few existing reviews of the third Gallifrey series floating around the internet, but one of the few I found described Paul Sutton’s “Appropriation” as “competent” — and I can’t really disagree with that sentiment, but I certainly have no desire to add to it. The first two plays in the third “season” seemed to focus more on their characters, but “Appropriation” subsumes everything in the service of political machinations: there is nothing going on here beyond naked ambition and desperation. I was not expecting this from the author of “Arrangements for War,” but yet again I found myself almost completely unconcerned with the action and its potential consequences. The Matrix was destroyed in the last story — naturally, this has no noticeable consequences whatsoever, apart from making communications more difficult.

We’re also back to the political negotiations with other temporal powers from the first season, and they’re still uninteresting — except this time we get a replay of “The Invasion of Time,” in which the transduction barrier is the only thing protecting Gallifrey from invasion. So it goes down, and the Sunari invade Gallifrey, and we’ve got two immensely powerful, time-active civilizations locked in combat, so this has to be compelling, right? No, actually — the invasion consists of running up and down corridors shooting at each other.

Soon, though, the invasion is repelled, setting up the second half of the story in which Romana, Darkel, and a number of faceless Time Lord characters debate the finer points of the rules of presidential succession. When your entire drama turns around an election, it’s remarkably ineffective to make the rules up on the spot — at least when Romana declared herself Imperiatrix, it resonated against her desire to maintain Gallifreyan democracy; here, when she declares that the law allows her to name her next regeneration as her own successor, it doesn’t resonate with anything apart from the need for convenience. Ultimately, “Appropriation” is little more than a treatise on the workings of a government that doesn’t exist and whose rules have rarely been established. I’m sure some find this interesting; I most certainly do not.